Another of Jess Phillips' Labour Party colleagues Diane Abbott suffered a massive surge of sexist and racist abuse from right-wingers during the General Election.

But who does Jess Phillips describe as "literally the worst" when it comes to sexism?

Left-wing men!

Not only is Phillips willing to overlook the actual killing of a Labour Party MP in order to spew her hatred towards a hefty chunk of Labour Party voters, she's also staggeringly hypocritical about it too.

Being abusive towards a diverse demographic like "left-wing men" is absolutely outrageous from a so-called equality champion. Sure some left-wing men have sexist attitudes (rendering them idiots because equality of opportunity no matter your sex, age, ethnicity or creed is one of the bedrocks of left-wing politics), but to generalise about all left-wing men as "literally the worst" in light of the absolute tide of sexist and bigoted abuse coming from the right is unbelievable stuff from someone who poses as an equality champion and a campaigner against political abuse.Just imagine if someone used such incredibly tenuous reasoning to generalise that self-styled centrist women are "literally the worst" at politics. The likes of Jess Phillips would be spewing outrage in moments over such a crass generalisation wouldn't they?But they're apparently free to make crass generalisations of their own.Phillips went on to generalise that when left-wing men "close their eyes at night and think of amazing people who have changed the world, it’s always some white dude that pops into their head".Just imagine the outrage she would spew if anyone deigned to generalise about the sexist thoughts that all feminists have at night.

Justifiable outrage.

Phillips' so-called reasoning for launching yet another divisive and damaging attack on the Labour left is just as bad as her hypocrisy. She argued that sometimes men have objected to all-women shortlists and the like as justification for giving right-wing hacks at the Daily Telegraph yet another anti-Labour attack line by tarring all left-wing men as "literally the worst".In her worldview it's as if working class communities objecting to the exclusion of several popular local candidates in order to parachute in a privately educated elitist candidate with absolutely no connection to the region whatever just because she's female (the Blairite special adviser Anna Turley being handed the Labour safe seat of Redcar for example) is somehow worse than right-wing fanatics sending anti-Semetic and racist abuse to female MPs, making death threats and rape threats, and even murdering female Labour Party politicians in the street!

The problem for Jess Phillips is that her rhetoric just doesn't stack up. She bases her claims that left-wing men are "literally the worst" on the fact that they sometimes object to all-female shortlists, but she must understand that the consequence of her constant trolling of her own party is to turn people away in droves.

Jess Phillips is so intent on continuing her strategy of internal party wrecking that she's demonstrably willing to sacrifice future female MPs at the next general election because she'd rather see future female Labour MPs lose to the Tories (just 21% of Tory MPs are women) than a left-wing man like Jeremy Corbyn become Prime Minister.It's a wonder how on earth Jess Phillips ended up in the Labour Party at all if she's so filled with hatred and revulsion at left-wing men. Well it isn't really. Phillips must have known that Labour have the best gender balance of any party so it's impossible to avoid imagining that she decided that spending time with all the left-wing men she so clearly hates and despises was worth it because it was the best choice for her political career given that she'd be half as likely to make it as an MP in the male dominated Tory party.Aside from driving people away from Labour with her divisive generalisations and constant attacks on the party leadership, Phillips is also doing something else. The kind of elitist identity-politics fixated feminism espoused by Phillips, Harriet Harman and Theresa May is exactly the kind of thing that drives people away from feminism too.

The reason these women willingly trampled on millions of women from less privileged backgrounds by supporting the Tory policy of loading the financial burden of the bankers' crisis onto women's shoulders is that their elitist version of feminism is fixated on stuff like the percentage of women who are chairs of parliamentary select committees, the number of female FTSE100 directors, or the pay rates of millionaires at the BBC, not on helping women in the most need first.

Of course Phillips and her supporters will try to play sub-juvenile identity politics by saying that as a left-wing male I'm somehow proving her point by objecting to her divisive trolling and criticising her elitist version of feminism that allows her to trample on women from less privileged backgrounds while playing the victim herself. They'll pretend that pointing out that someone is talking hypocritical self-defeating crap is somehow worse than the tsunami of sexist and racist abuse Diane Abbott suffered during the 2017 General Election, or the constant stream of death threats and rape threats against women in politics from right-wingers, or the actual murder of a Labour Party MP by an extreme-right fanatic, but people who are motivated by hate (of genuine socialists, or men) tend to make extremely poor arguments.

Now that the outrageously abusive troll Tom Blenkinsop has quit the party (deliberately salting his once safe Labour constituency on his way out so that it fell to the Tories) Jess Phillips has to be considered one of the prime contenders for absolute worst troll in the Parliamentary Labour Party, although she has stiff competition from men like Wes Streeting, Chris Leslie and Ian Austin.It would be a victory of sorts for Jess Phillips' crap identity politics fixated version of feminism if she could snatch the title of "literally the worst troll in the Parliamentary Labour Party" off the men who have completely dominated the role over the years. By continually attacking her fellow Labour Party members, discrediting herself, discrediting the party and expending way more effort on attacking the party leadership instead of the Tories and their sexist austerity dogma, she's definitely putting up a heck of a fight to be recognised as Labour's worst troll.

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Tuesday, 8 August 2017

Right-wing Labour MPs are so determined to attack the genuine democratic socialists in the Labour Party that they're making absolute fools of themselves on Twitter.

Anyone would have thought that the 2017 election result would have given Corbyn-sceptic orthodox neoliberal Labour MPs a reason to reconsider their right-wing views and unite behind the party leadership.

Corbyn reversed two decades of Labour Party decline by becoming the first Labour leader to actually gain parliamentary seats since 1997 by securing the biggest increase in the Labour share of the vote since Clement Attlee in 1945.

If Corbyn could achieve this turnaround in Labour Party fortunes with a bitterly divided party full of right-wing backstabbing MPs who hate Jeremy Corbyn with as much passion as they hate his idea of democratising the Labour Party to give ordinary members more say, then what could he achieve with a more united party?

That was the question an awful lot of Labour members and supporters have been thinking about since the election results came in, but obviously not the right-wing Labour MPs themselves.

For them the election result was an absolute disaster because it ruined their chances of launching yet another destructive coup against Jeremy Corbyn. So they're now fixated on a different question:

What can we do now to inflict as much damage as possible on Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour leadership?

Unfortunately for Powell her attack backfired spectacularly when it turned out the new Momentum group was actually being set up in the Middlesbrough South and Cleveland East constituency that was one of just six Labour losses during the 2017 election, not Anna Turley's constituency in Redcar.

The Momentum group was being set up to help Tracy Harvey who worked hard to undo the damage inflicted by Blenkinsop's ridiculously divisive tantrums, but fell short of retaining the seat against the odds by just over 1,000 votes after UKIP stood down in order to help the Tories win the seat.

Apparently, according to Lucy Powell, Momentum and the Labour left are wrong to try to win back a seat lost to Tory-UKIP collusion due to the dismal antics of an abusive Blairite MP!

What's even worse than the idiocy of her criticism is the fact that the sanctimonious pillock even had the lack of self awareness to lecture the fellow Labour Party members she was publicly and inaccurately lambasting about the need to "unite to fight the Tories"!

This is a woman who participated in the spectacularly failed Anyone But Corbyn coup lecturing other people about party unity!

Then there's the behaviour of Anna Turley herself, the right-wing privately educated Blairite MP who was parachuted into the Labour safe seat of Redcar (and who better to represent a poverty stricken, working class, steel industry dominated northern town like Redcar than a privately educated right-winger parachuted in from London against the will of the local Labour Party eh?)

Having witnessed Powell make such a fool of herself on Twitter over the weekend you would have thought Turley would at least be a bit careful about her own Twitter utterances.

But no. She was so desperate to wade into the debate and attack the Labour Party left that she fell for a ridiculously obvious bit of Tory concern trolling.

Concern trolling is where a supporter of a rival group or party poses as a supporter in order to create divisions by expressing disingenuous concerns.

Turley decided to use the whole incident to promise a Twitter user called Eileen Robinson who claimed that she would abandon Labour and vote Tory for the first time in her life if there was a Momentum candidate in Redcar.

So instead of steering well clear of the divisive stink created by Powell, and definitely steering clear of the divisive antics of a glaringly obvious Tory concern troll, Turley decided to use the incident to attack the Labour Party left by making a promise to one of the worst and most dishonest people in Redcar.

The continued divisive behaviour of these Labour Party right-wingers just goes to show how frightened they are.

They know that Jeremy Corbyn is now within touching distance of an outright win, and they know that he's getting ever closer to achieving a mandate to democratise the Labour Party by allowing local party members to remove MPs who are corrupt, divisive, negligent, incompetent or fanatically right-wing.

The orthodox neoliberal Labour MPs who have been parachuted into Labour safe seats are absolutely terrified of Jeremy Corbyn's success because they're actually terrified of their own constituents unifying to demand a better candidate.

The grand irony is that the likes of Powell, Turley and other internal Labour Party wreckers like Wes Streeting is that the only strategy they can think of to try to avert re-selection for bad MPs is to continue with exactly the kind of bitter divisive feuding that makes it even more likely that their own Labour Party members would want to get rid of them.

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Thursday, 3 August 2017

61% of Brexit supporters say that they consider significant economic damage to the UK economy to be "a price worth paying" for their beloved Brexit.

The YouGov poll on Brexit attitudes also revealed that amongst Brexiters over the age of 65 the proportion who are willing to see the British economy significantly damaged rises to 71%.

When asked whether they would see members of their own family thrown on the unemployment scrap heap as a price of Britain leaving the EU an astounding 50% of over-65s said yes!

This means that a clear majority of retirement age Leave supporters are Brexit Extremists who wish harm on the UK economy, meaning job losses for huge numbers of strangers. Half of them would also gladly see members of their own family lose their jobs and left at the mercy of the cruel, draconian and deeply discriminatory Tory benefits system!

Not only do these dreadful people want to strip the rest of us of our longstanding rights to live, work, travel and study in 31 other countries across Europe, they've also completely abandoned the pretence that Brexit was going to be great for the UK economy, and would actually like to see the UK economy slump into another recession, and hundreds of thousands of us lose our jobs. Just as long as they get their beloved Brexit.

Imagine what kind of person would be willing to see their own sons, daughters and grandchildren thrust into destitution in order to achieve some abstract political objective that they're unable to even explain the details of.

Just think about it. If government ministers are still bickering and squabbling over the details of Brexit, then how can some random pensioner possibly know enough about it to know it's worth condemning their younger family members and their dependent children into poverty to achieve it?

Just imagine being comfortably retired and wishing unemployment on your own family members in order to achieve some abstract political objective.

Is it any wonder that younger generations consider the baby boomers to be the most selfish generation of all when so many of them would condemn their own family members to poverty for such intangible benefits to themselves?

These shocking poll results prove how difficult it is to change people's minds once they've been conned into believing in something.

Millions of Brexiters were sold the lie that Brexit would make us all better off to the tune of £350 million a week, and through wonderful quickfire trade deals with non-EU countries. They were told to dismiss any negative warnings as "project fear" propaganda and that Britain has had "enough of experts".

Now that the reality is starting to bite (the weak pound, soaring inflation, the worst GDP growth in the EU, the Brexit wage slump, recruitment crises in the NHS and agriculture, financial sector relocations back to the safety of the Single Market, the chaotic Tory approach to the Brexit negotiations ...) these people would rather pretend that they knew all along that they were voting to make us all poorer (including making their own relatives redundant) than to admit that they were gullible enough to fall for the Brexit con.Aside from exposing the shockingly callous attitudes of millions of Brexit voters to the hardship and suffering of other people, including their own family members, these results prove that Mark Twain was absolutely right when he said that it's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.

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Sunday, 30 July 2017

Just imagine if an independent left-wing website had published an article from a self-confessed Holocaust denier that featured brazen displays of sexism and anti-Semitism like the Sunday Times just did.

You know as well as I do that the right-wing media would pick up on the article and use it to smear the entire left as a bunch of misogynistic and anti-Semitic bigots, and to generate the absurd narrative that it's abusive and violent fanaticism in politics is solely a left-wing issue.

When the Sunday Times published an extraordinary article from the controversialist Kevin Myers which was dripping with sexism (repeated claims that women don't earn enough because they're not as driven, logical or masterful as men) and casual anti-semitism (allusion to the age old greedy money-grabbing Jew trope) they simply expected to get away with it as if printing such casual bigotry is just "fair comment".

We all know that we would never hear the end of it if some Corbyn-supporting site had hosted such brazenly sexist and anti-Semitic content, but because it's one of Rupert Murdoch's propaganda sheets, we're all supposed to be mollified with the deletion of the article and the explanation that it was just a "mistake" (as if commissioning a Holocaust denier to write an article full of bigoted stereotypes and then publishing it is the kind of mistake we've all made in our lives).

The bigoted Times column that would have hadright-wingers howling with outrage if such sexismand anti-Semitism had appeared on a left-wing blog.

The most shocking thing about the article isn't that it was written (we all know there are still loads of sexists, racists and anti-Semites out there) but the fact that a supposedly reputable newspaper saw fit to publish such outright bigotry.

It tells you everything you need to know about the cultural acceptance of sexism and anti-Semitism at the Sunday Times that they actually commissioned an article from a known Holocaust denier and nobody at all saw fit to raise concerns about the extreme bigotry in the article as it went through the editing and publishing process.

Not only do the Tory party have a very lax attitude towards right-wing extremism, the right-wing press who run constant propaganda for the Tories also feature regular displays of bigotry and right-wing extremism.

The Sunday Times are far from alone in hosting extreme bigotry for which independent left-wing websites would (rightfully) be condemned for if they did anything like as bad.

Unlike the radio station LBC the Daily Mail saw no problem with continuing to employ the unspeakable woman, even after she publicly called for a "final solution" against Muslims.

Self-righteous MPs have launched an inquiry into the abuse of MPs, but the inquiry will tell them absolutely nothing unless they widen the scope of the investigation to look at what is inspiring people to send so many abusive messages to MPs.

Without widening the scope of the inquiry to look into the extreme behaviour of the right-wing press (the casual displays of bigotry and extremism outlined above, declaring judges "enemies of the people" for the "crime" of standing up for parliamentary democracy, the "crush the saboteurs" headline, the extreme smear-mongering campaign against Jeremy Corbyn during the election) and to investigate MPs own extreme behaviour and tolerance of extreme-right online abuse when it suits their purposes (like Theresa May quoting an extreme-right Twitter troll in parliament) then they'll never get to the bottom of why so many ordinary people feel emboldened to lob extreme abuse and threats at politicians.

If MPs and supposedly reputable newspapers create a political atmosphere where bigotry, threats, smears, abuse and extreme-right nastiness are normalised, it takes incredible feats of self-regarding hypocrisy for theat lot to react to ordinary people behaving in the very same way as if they're uniquely sick degenerates, rather than easily led people simply imitating the behaviour they see politicians and journalists continually getting away with.

Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

Another obvious question that arises is how on earth the Tories have managed to get away with such a prolonged ideological attack on the wages of hard-working people without triggering a furious backlash.

PropagandaOne of the obvious reasons the Tories have got away with this sustained ideological assault on ordinary working people is the fact that the complicit mainstream media barely ever covers the issue.

Not only have the mainstream media been complicit with the Tory "war on wages" by omission, they've also desperately failed to ridicule the ridiculous Orwellian propaganda narrative from the Tories that they're the party for "hardworking people".

The Tories have orchestrated the worst collapse in workers' wages on record, repeatedly slashed in-work social security (Tax Credits, sick pay, the child welfare system, maternity & paternity pay, Employment Support Allowance ...), attacked workers' rights (like the right of low-income workers to take bad bosses to Employment Tribunals without paying £1,200 in unlawful Tory tribunal fees), and created a system where a shocking 55% of all families living in poverty are working families.

It's absolutely extraordinary that the mainstream media have allowed an anti-worker party like this to dress themselves up as friends of "hardworking people" without repeatedly calling them out on their completely backwards "black is white" propaganda.

Divide and conquer

One of the classic right-wing political tactics is to drive divisions within sectors of society in order to get them hating each other, rather than fighting back against the government that is actually to blame for most of their problems.

The division the Tories have created in order to drive down all of our wages is between public sector and private sector workers.

The right-wing press have been particularly helpful to the Tories in helping spread this social division with their continual attacks on public sector employees, especially teachers and NHS staff.The idea is to stoke jealousy amongst private sector employees about the supposedly brilliant wages and fantastic pensions enjoyed by public sector workers in order to justify imposing real terms pay cuts on public sector workers year after year, whilst simultaneously increasing their workloads too.

The economy is interconnectedDim-witted private sector employees buy into the crude envy politics of the right-wing press and actually end up supporting the public sector pay freeze. They support it because they're actually gullible enough believe the ridiculous narrative that public sector wage repression is about equalising conditions between the public and private sector, rather than a political means of driving down the wages of all of us.

The reason they're too stupid to understand is that they've been conditioned into thinking about the economy in super-simplistic "us and them" terms, rather than seeing the economy as a spectacularly complex mass of interconnections.

Just think about it. If nurses, paramedics and other NHS staff are hit by huge real terms pay cuts for seven consecutive years, what kind of effect would this have on the local economy? Would the private sector employees of a hospital's now-struggling local coffee shops and sandwich bars be better off, or worse off, as increasingly over-worked medical staff bring packed lunches instead of eating out?

Would local businesses like restaurants, cinemas, gyms, and takeaways fare better or worse as their public sector clientele are forced to cut back dramatically on luxury expenditure?

If public sector wages in your town are collapsing and people are quitting public sector jobs in droves to seek private sector employment, is this increased competition for private sector jobs going to have an upwards or downwards influence on wages in the private sector?

Anyone who can't see that an intense campaign of wage repression against one sector of society is going to have a knock-on effect on their own wages too is obviously so riddled with envy that they've abandoned even the most basic critical thinking skills in favour of outright jealousy and hate.

Those cheers were an illustration of the ideological hatred that Tories have towards public sector workers (despite being particularly well-paid public sector workers themselves!). To actually cheer themselves for their continued attacks on public sector pay just goes to show how much the Tory party have bought into their own vile divisive propaganda.

A significant proportion of the Tory party are now so enamoured with their own anti-public sector propaganda that there is no way that the party can change direction without triggering yet another internal party civil war on top of the battles that are already raging over Europe and Theresa May's pathetic leadership.

These people actually believe that it makes economic sense to attack workers' wages which depresses economic demand, and create a repetition of the household debt boom that preceded the 2007-08 financial sector meltdown.

They also see public sector workers like nurses, firefighters and teachers as the new "enemy within" who need to be attacked and crushed like the miners were in the 1980s.

The Tories are now in a hopeless bind because they're incapable of seeing beyond their own propaganda. They've spent seven years making excuses for socially and economically ruinous austerity dogma, and they've spend seven years deliberately repressing all of our wages.

If Corbyn's had such a difficult job of steering Labour away from hard-right austerity dogma and wage repression policies, just imagine how difficult it would be for a new Tory leader to convince their MPs and party members that they need to reverse austerity and stop wage repression because they've been guilty of driving the UK economy in totally the wrong direction for seven disastrous years.

As long as this Tory government continues to defy the national interest by clinging onto power, there's going to be nothing but the most superficial PR-driven changes of direction.

As long as they cling to power their wage repression policies which affect all of us will continue to increase rates of in-work poverty, cripple economic demand, and re-inflate the dangerous household debt bubble.

Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

Wednesday, 26 July 2017

The fact that a serial failure like Chris Grayling still has an important cabinet position is indicative of the absolute dearth of talent in the Tory party.

Grayling started off as one of Iain Duncan Smith's henchmen at the DWP, the then spent three years as the worst Secretary of State for Justice imaginable.Despite his almost unbreakable tolerance for abject incompetence from his ministers* David Cameron finally saw sense in 2015 and moved Grayling into largely ceremonial roles where he had little ability to wreak havoc over ordinary people's lives.After David Cameron's EU gamble backfired so spectacularly Theresa May gave Grayling a lifeline back into a position where he could cause more damage by making him Transport Secretary.

Grayling's successor Michael Gove was the 2nd unqualified Lord Chancellor in modern history, Gove's successor Liz Truss was the 3rd, and her successor David Liddington is the 4th legally unqualified Lord Chancellor in succession.

Unlawful Tribunal feesIt's taken four years and an epic battle all the way up to the Supreme Court to get Chris Grayling's discriminatory anti-worker employment tribunal fees declared unlawful (thanks to Unison for fighting to protect workers' rights).Despite their claims to the contrary this legislation was always intended as a bad bosses' charter to give terrible employers the freedom to abuse their low-income workers and sack them at will, safe in the knowledge they wouldn't be able to afford the employment tribunal fees.Not only did these fees act as a deliberate Tory barrier to the justice system for low-income workers, they also demonstrably discriminated against women. It's telling that instead of quitly backtracking on this depraved policy of pricing people out of seeking justice Theresa May carried on fighting tooth and nail to keep these sexist Tory rules in place long after Grayling was gone.Probation service privatisation

Chris Grayling's ideologically driven privatisation of the probation service was criticised at the time as a reckless gamble, and the resulting chaos is probably even worse than predicted.Grayling decided that the taxpayer should keep responsibility for probation services for long-term prisoners while probation services for prisoners sentenced to a year or less were carved up and distributed to 21 different private outsourcing companies.A 2016 report found that ex-prisoners are being failed and the public put at risk. Of the 86 released prisoners the research team investigated not a single one of them had any help in relation to training, education or employment. A third were released with nowhere to live, and one registered sex offender simply disappeared after release.Legal aid cutsLegal Aid is a fundamental part of the modern welfare system which prevents the justice system from being just a plaything of the rich by providing adequate legal representation to people from poor and ordinary backgrounds.Grayling is a fanatical right-winger so he attacked legal aid funding with glee, stripping legal aid entitlement from all kinds of cases. The result was a predictable rise in the percentage of people attempting to represent themselves in court, meaning thousands upon thousands of wasted hours in court (especially family courts) as proceedings had to be abandoned due to procedural cockups from self-representing legal novices.Aside from the costs and the wasted time, there's also the fact that unknown thousands have been denied justice altogether as they simply gave up on the idea of seeking legal redress for the injustices they've suffered for lack of legal representation.Restrictions on legal aid for domestic violence victims

Tendering for legal aid contractsAside from cutting legal aid to the bone another of Chris Grayling's brainwaves was to introduce tendering for legal aid services, so that people needing legal aid would have no longer have freedom to chose their own lawyer (from a local company, or from a firm of legal specialists in the field required) and simply be handed one from a pre-approved government list.This planned shakeup was designed to benefit big legal companies and drive small independent legal practices out of business. One of the big players in this get-what-you're given strategy was, believe it or not, the haulage company Eddie Stobart!Thankfully Grayling's successor Michael Gove listened to the absolute chorus of condemnation from the legal profession and scrapped Grayling's madcap plans.

Selling prison advice to the Saudi tyrantsOne of Grayling's most widely condemned schemes was the establishment of a shady commercial offshoot of the Justice Department called Justice Solutions International which won a £5.9 million contract to advise the brutal Islamist tyrants in Saudi Arabia how to run their prisons.In October 2015 Jeremy Corbyn forced one of his first significant U-turns out of the Tory government by calling for the contract with the Saudi tyrants to be scrapped, which Grayling's successor Michael Gove eventually did due citing "human rights concerns".Criminal court feesIn 2015 Chris Grayling introduced fees for defendants found guilty at a magistrates court to pay £150 and those convicted at crown court to hand over £1,200. People complained that the fees were incentivising innocent people to plead guilty to crimes they didn't commit out of fear of being hit with Grayling's fees if they tried to plead their innocence. Over 100 magistrates resigned over the charges. Grayling's successor Michael Gove scrapped the charges saying the "intent has fallen short".Cutting legal aid for prisoners

Chris Grayling loved playing up to the hard-right press by devising policies to be tough on prisoners. One of these schemes was a 2013 ruling banning legal aid for prisoners.In my view you don't have to be a tree-huggling liberal leftie to believe that a prisoner who has been denied any kind of education, offender behaviour programmes or training while locked up should have the right to seek legal intervention to ensure they do get the help they need to avoid re-offending in the future.In 2017 Grayling's cuts to legal aid for prisoners were ruled unlawful and overturned.

Banning booksAnother of Grayling's attacks on the prison population was his ruling banning them from receiving books. This one really hit the headlines because there's nothing quite as right-wing authoritarian as banning books.In December 2014 a High Court ruling found that banning prisoners from receiving books was unlawful, and Grayling's successor Michael Gove sensibly decided not to bother appealing against the judgement and binned the policy.Unlawful prison absconder policyOne of Grayling's most ridiculous blunders came when he decided to introduce a knee-jerk policy after the right-wing press whipped up a huge fuss when an armed robber called Michael "Skullcracker" Wheatley went on the run from day release.Grayling's new policy was to rush through a ban on any prisoner who had absconded from serving in open prison. The problem was that this new policy glaringly contradicted a previous Grayling policy that inmates serving indeterminate sentences should go through a phased release from closed to open prisons "in order to test their readiness for release into the community".In 2015 Grayling's knee-jerk prisoner absconder policy was declared unlawful at the High Court after a case was brought by a prisoner called John Gilbert who technically absconded from day release because he missed his last train, but handed himself into a police station first thing in the morning.The judges said the inconsistency between Grayling’s new absconder policy and his long-standing directions to the parole board was "irrational", and they were also "not impressed" by Grayling's absurd claim that since the ban and the parole board directions had both been issued by him, he had the power to ignore or contradict either of them at will!Making Michael Gove look good

Michael Gove is a Rupert Murdoch hack turned politician. As education secretary he vandalised the education system by privatising thousands of state schools into the hands of unaccountable private psuedo-charities (many operated by major Tory party donors). He also oversaw a proliferation of unqualified teachers into our classrooms and once famously claimed that all schools should attain above average status!The fact that a bumbling right-wing fanatic like Michael Gove had to come in and clear up so many of Grayling's messes just goes to show how utterly crap he must have been.Just imagine how ideologically extreme and incompetent a person would have to be in order to end up making a right-wing fruit loop like Michael Gove look level-headed and competent in comparison!

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OR

* = Despite their serial incompetence Iain Duncan Smith, George Osborne and Theresa May were never sacked, but Grayling's monumental blunders at Ministry of Justice were so huge, and so regular that even David Cameron couldn't ignore them.

Some people think that the misandrist anti-men ranters are the worst kind of feminists, but I disagree. These people certainly give feminists a bad name, but in reality they're not feminists at all, they're bigoted female supremacists.

The worst kind of feminist is the kind of feminist who only stands up for women's rights for their own elite class because they are totally and completely immune to their own privilege, or even worse, because they're driven by such hatred and contempt for "the lower orders" that they consider them unworthy of having the same rights as elites, like the right to freedom from discrimination for example.

Theresa May is a woman who is so riddled with elitism and class hatred that she's continued David Cameron's policy of economically persecuting low income women with austerity dogma to fund tax cuts for the mega-rich, and has fought tooth and nail all the way to the Supreme Court to continue the unlawful Tory policy of deliberately pricing low income female workers out of the justice system as a favour to bad employers.

She is only capable of caring about women's rights when it's comes to her own super-wealthy class because she believes in an elitist "feminism for the rich" where deliberate Tory gender discrimination against low-income female workers is perfectly fine as long as millionaire women have pay parity with millionaire men.

Theresa May doesn't give a damn about low income British women because she's a leading member of a political party that has been economically persecuting them and deliberately pricing them out of the justice system for years, and she gives even less of a damn about the even greater suffering of women in countries like Saudi Arabia and Yemen.

One of the most important things about feminism is recognising that the worst gender discrimination, misogyny and violence is almost always suffered by the most vulnerable women in society. Feminism isn't something that needs to be addressed top-down by ensuring gender parity amongst privileged millionaires as a priority, it's something that needs to be addressed from the bottom upwards by combating the harshest injustices as a priority, and one of the biggest obstacles to this bottom upwards approach to feminism is demonstrably Theresa May's Tory party.

It's beyond doubt that Theresa May believes in a sickeningly elitist form of feminism where women at the top of society deserve parity with men, but the lower down the social hierarchy, the fewer rights women deserve. She believes in this "feminism for the rich" so strongly that she actively and deliberately discriminates against low-income British women in numerous different ways whilst crying tears of outrage over the pay packets of millionaires.

In reality she gives so little concern to women she considers beneath her on the social hierarchy that she even wilfully colludes with the misogynistic Islamist tyrants who rule over Saudi Arabia.

Anyone who imagines that Theresa May is a legitimate feminist just because of her gender, or just because she cries faux tears of outrage over the suffering of her own elite class is a ridiculously gullible idiot who knows nothing about feminism whatever.

Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR

* = During her time at the Home Office Theresa May was the actual architect of this deeply discriminatory policy of using economic apartheid rules to force British people to live in exile for the "crime" of falling in love with non-EU citizens. She doesn't give the slightest damn that these rules discriminate against women, especially women who live in poorer regions of the UK like the north east, south Wales, and Northern Ireland.